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Edward Snowden weighs in on the huge internet vulnerability that could have helped the US spy on citizens
Edward Snowden weighs in on the huge internet vulnerability that could have helped the US spy on citizens
Cale Guthrie WeissmanMay 22, 2015, 02:44 IST
Did the US exploit a vulnerability that made it possible to snoop on data traffic that was thought to be secure?That's been the question for the past 24 hours after news of the LogJam vulnerability became publicly known.Now Edward Snowden has added his two cents on the issue.Put simply, LogJam is a vulnerability that rests in encrypted internet traffic. When someone accesses a website that is 'encrypted,' it was thought to mean that the data being transferred can only be seen by the sender and the recipient.This new issue, which was announced yesterday, shows that it is possible for large-scale online operations to actually intercept this data without anyone noticing and even being able to alter it. So even so-called secure data isn't safe from external snooping thanks to this LogJam bug.Even though the discovery is a big one - it shows that previous conceptions of internet security are actually false - many experts weren't sure how likely it was that the vulnerability was exploited. Today Edward Snowden took part in a Reddit AMA and offered his own unique views.A Redditor asked whether the exiled whistleblower believed that the NSA capitalized on this newly discovered vulnerability.Snowden's response:Without so much as saying the US did know about LogJam, Snowden is incredulous about how the government couldn't know. LogJam's existence is predicated on lax encryption standards from the '90s. So while Snowden can't be sure, he is (at the very least) suspicious. We'll likely never know the extent to which LogJam (or any other vulnerability) has been acted on by the government. But Snowden, who took this time on Reddit to urge people to work to stop the government's data collection program, sees this as an indication of what is possible.
